Devices like PCs, laptops, smartphones or head mounted eye trackers (such as augmented reality glasses, virtual reality glasses, eye tracking glasses or smart glasses) may be equipped with a gaze tracking system, which is adapted for determining the direction in which a person using the device is looking (eye tracking) and for determining, at which point the person is looking (gaze tracking).
A gaze tracking system may be used for supporting a search, which is a key activity when working with computers. However, optical searches of humans are usually happening both in the focus point as well as in the parafoveal, perifoveal and peripheral view, summarized in the following by the term peripheral view. When searching for a graphical distinguishable object (such as an image, a word, a text block, an icon, etc.), the focus point of human gaze is selectively directed to objects of interest it pre-identifies in the peripheral view based on optical recognizable aspects or object categories (e.g. dominant colours, structure, specific elements like people, text or graphics in images and icons, word length, arrangement of small, high rounded and straight letters in words) as potential candidates. The category characteristics which may be detected by a human in his peripheral view may depend on the search task itself and are generally limited by the capabilities of human vision in different areas of the peripheral view.